The Aztecs had eight omens that foretold
the arrival of the conquistadors
& almost all of them ended in fire.
Orange plume against the moon,
a burning temple & the storm of light
that cleaved the sky. Lake Texcoco
boiled up & singed Tenochtitlan down
to the bone. Eventually, a mirror appeared
on an ashen crane. Eventually, war horses
descended from salt & brought with them
a god with skin of abscess. What is the end
if not a new fire? If not the spectacle of silver
unsheathed for the first time? If not hands that
reach out in awe before vanishing?

I reach out in awe before vanishing
into my father's shoulder. My father vanishes
into a single tremor. I've never seen him break
like that: a wave pounding its head against
hospital doors, demanding they spit his father
back out. Demanding the man be brought back
unmarked by grief, grayslick & glossed with bloom.
This country tested my grandfather with a knife
of bone, a bottle, an endless unlit street,
& finally won. I wasted so many years listening
to his stories before understanding them as history
that must survive us. It's too late for him
to hear me, I know. But I haven't stopped trying,
I've only started to name my grandfather.

I only started to name my grandfather abuelo

Cursing his perfect memory for its decay,
my father says childhood is a starved fog.
Labyrinth of locked doors, if only he saved
the keys. If only he kept a better atlas. He once
travelled this country to archive its scroll
& scripture, to carve a space for us. He's never
stopped, really. So how far must he go before
it's considered exodus? How many people
must know the story before it's canon? It's strange
irony; a historian glutted with so many centuries
that decades start leaving him in the night.
A good son, I memorize his hands, his careful
joy, arroyo between resilient teeth, but I am
a reckless historian, I get ink on all the bones.

A reckless historian, I get ink on all the bones,
rewrite their stillness as reliquary, mistake
headstone for gemstone. Forgive me. If my hands
stop moving they will forget where they learned
this choreography; how they reach down time's
infinite throat & find a spine, a snake. Salvage
its tongue. Forgive me. I was born to my father
already mid-story & I haven 't stopped listening.
As he tells it, there is empire before empire,
history before historia. It starts with a skull
in a jaguar's unflinching jaw. Crack of stone
against the mountain. Moctezuma climbs the temple
steps, burns copal. Quetzalcoatl appears at the tree
line. Then, thunder, the smell of gunpowder.